I had a great start to the week yesterday. At five past nine I had the chief exec of a law firm chewing me out over something I wrote on my blog (removed it while some things are clarified) and then around 11am a prospective client whose new site is not live yet, called me to say that their existing website had been hacked and some "inappropriate links" had been hidden in their home page. Needless to say we got them sorted out pretty quickly.

So, LDPs are almost upon us. Who's looking for a 25% shareholder in the form of an accountancy practice perhaps?

I mentioned last month that I was struggling through Richard Suskind's book, "The End of Lawyers; Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services", well I've officially given up. Too turgid, too long. Sorry Richard.

If you are in London on Wednesday or Thursday this week then why not come along to Stand K29 at the Law London 2009 conference & exhibition and come say hello. We'll be there for both days.

Anyway, if you do nothing else when reading this newsletter, please have a look at the Animoto story. One of the best web applications I've ever seen to allow visual/auditory communication.

If there's anything I should know about, please do let me know.

Regs….David.

01173250200

In this issue:

• Animoto
• Email newsletters at work
• 360 Legal survey - win £500 of consultancy
• Premium rate number scam
• Social Media; LinkedIn, Twitter etc
• Site of the Month - Zamzar
• Funny Bit at the End - The value of a smile

Animoto

It's not very often any more that I get completely blown away by a new web app, but that's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. Animoto is a website that takes photos that you upload and music that you select on the site and stitches together the most amazing music/image montage video. I've created one for our home page and we are now talking to clients about how to use this on their website e.g. a staff montage video for each department page. Take a look at the video on our home page and then follow the link to the main Animoto website. If you'd like to see some samples that we created for clients, please let me know.

Email newsletters at work

This is not the first time I've written about what happened with previous emails. But the point of doing it is to show the skeptics that email newsletters really do "work". Now, the term "work" can be defined in a number of ways. If we were in a product sales business it would be defined in terms of a sales figure. For a service business like ours it's about generating activity on our site and gaining some enquiries. Here are a couple of results, with a full write up on our blog :-

• 69 people visited the crossword page. 11 completed the crossword. Average time spent on the page was 4:30.
• 104 people visited the tips booklet download. 69 downloaded something.
• three people immediately emailed us. Two demos were booked.

360 Legal survey - win £500 of consultancy

The 360 Legal Group, who are business friends of ours, have launched a new survey looking at the Future of the Legal Industry. With the UK now deep in recession there has never been a more important time to understand how changes in the external marketplace are affecting law firms and how the industry is responding to the challenges it faces. If you have 5 mins over your cup of coffee perhaps you might fill it in. You might even win £500 worth of free consultancy.

Premium rate number scam

My thanks to Anne Irving of Irvings Solicitors who recently reported this. Someone had visited their website and filled in an enquiry form. The phone number they used in the form was a Premium Rate phone number. When the member of staff called the number they got an ansaphone at the other end, with a message saying we are connecting you, ringing but not being answered. Now, bear in mind that the form has what's called a "captcha code" on it to prevent it being filled in by a computer which means someone did this manually.

Something to keep an eye out for on your site.

Social Media; LinkedIn, Twitter etc

I figured it was about time we did some research around the sphere of social networking. I know that quite a lot has been written about this in various legal marketing press but thought our conscious opinion (pun intended) would not go amiss. We now have a social networks page on our website with some ideas on and a longer blog article on the same topic. Feel free to voice an opinion by commenting on the blog.

Site of the Month - Zamzar

Thanks go to Andrew Gray for this month's site. Zamzar is a site that let's you upload a file, select the format you would like it converted to and then you wait while it converts it before downloading the converted file. It's as simple as that, and, oh yeah, it's free!! Try it out yourself. The free version lets you convert files up to 1GB.

Funny Bit at the End - The value of a smile

OK, so YouTube might have banned UK visitors from watching music videos as they cannot agree a fee with the Performing Rights Society, but at least we can still watch BRILLIANT videos like this one called Validation.